“Cognitive involvement” refers to both the degree of focus on an event and overall activity of one's mental processes on tasks associated with that event. The focus on an event refers to the degree of concentration on a subject, for example, the degree to which a student is concentrating on his or her teacher's lesson. The overall activity of one's mental processes relating to an event refers to the amount of effort an individual puts forth on events or tasks related to the presentation. While it is impossible to accurately and dynamically calculate the mental processes of a human being, a close approximation may be derived from the overall physical activity of that person and the degree to which the physical activities relate to the presentation. For example, a student who is actively taking notes, or answering a teacher's question is more likely to be actively processing a teacher's lesson than one who is doodling, or sitting still.
It is important for anyone presenting information to another to be able to assess the cognitive involvement of his or her audience in order to determine the effectiveness of their presentation. From the presenter's perspective, the ability to determine the cognitive involvement of each audience member at any point in the presentation may be an invaluable means for critiquing or improving one's presentation skills, or as a means for dynamically changing a presentation in order to better serve the needs and interests of an audience.
In face-to-face, one-on-one interactions, a presenter may be able to identify when a listener is cognitively involved in the presentation by paying attention to visual clues. For example, seeing another person's eyes wander, or watching them doodle in a notebook suggests that the person is not focusing on the presentation. When the presentation is not face-to-face, or when the presenter is speaking to more than one individual, the presenter is not able to as easily determine whether each audience member is cognitively involved at any point in time.
Multiple methods have been developed and used in order to attempt to analyze the cognitive involvement of an audience member. Such methods typically rely on a user's response, such as user feedback, a user question, or other user activity intended to convey information to the presenter. For example, the analyzer system, as described at www.perceptionanalyzer.com, provides a remote device for users to respond to questions. Any system or method that requires an affirmative response of an audience member as a sole criteria is inherently flawed, because the audience member is aware that the presenter expects a response. This knowledge provides an incentive to the audience member to respond, therefore artificially inflating any determination of the involvement of the audience member.
Instead, it is desirable to determine the cognitive involvement of audience members using an objective formula, based on realistic criteria in order to arrive at a cognitive involvement score. Such a system preferably includes the ability to rely on criteria other than prompted or unprompted audience responses. In addition, it is desirable to provide a means for dynamically displaying the results of the determination to the presenter.